Allan Jagger - Rotary International

Allan O. Jagger, president of Rotary International in Great Britian and Ireland, tells ePolitix.com about his plans for the organisation.

Question - Could you outline the work of Rotary International and what you think the most important aspects of its work?

Allan O. Jagger: Rotary is an organisation of people in communities, small, large, national and international communities. And Rotary is seen as a key part of these communities. Rotary is essentially a service organisation. It is our business to assist local communities in providing vital services on both the national and international scene.

Rotary worldwide has 1.2 million Rotarians in 32,000 clubs, across 200 countries. It’s a huge global organisation. Each individual Rotarian is part of a Rotary Club. In Great Britain and Ireland there are 1,874 clubs. It is up to these clubs to identify issues and projects to help create better communities for all.

It is a Rotarian’s task to help create a better world and that manifests itself in our charity the Rotary Foundation, which this year is involved in some major public heath initiatives.

Rotary to me is a way of living. To be a Rotarian you promise to live by a code 'The four way test' - Is it the truth, is it fair to all concerned, will it build goodwill and better friendships, will it be beneficial to all concerned.

This code of living was given to us by a businessman, whose business was actually failing. He devised the test to find a fairer way of doing business with his employees, his customers and his suppliers. It is a moral code to live by, once applied his business flourished. When we become Rotarians we promise to live by the four way test, this takes some doing, but it does lead us into all sorts of partnerships with other organisations. It’s very important that we up hold these high ethical standards for our members.

And that’s what Rotary does; through our daily lives Rotarians help their community. I am proud to be a Rotarian and I am proud to be the president of the some 58,000 Rotarians in Great Britain and Ireland.

Question - So as president what are your main aspirations for Rotary?

Allan O. Jagger: Well as a president my number one job is to co-ordinate the 29 Rotary districts in Great Britain and Ireland. Each district has a district governor elected to represent the views of the Clubs in the district. The 29 governors sit on Rotary’s General Council, which meet four times a year. It is my primary job to chair those meetings and co-ordinate the work they do.  Rotary in Great Britain and Ireland is a business – a business of giving service.

It’s up to the General Council to decide what our objectives are for the Rotary year, based upon what club Rotarians want to do, as it is the club Rotarians who actually deliver the work.

I simply can’t wait to witness all the wonderfully diverse work to be done by Rotarians in the forthcoming year, which is only limited to the imagination of a Rotarian. There are already some wonderfully creative and exciting projects underway.

Question - What are your main objectives for the forthcoming year?

Allan O. Jagger: - Rotary has three main objectives for the forthcoming year.

The first is to reverse the decline in our membership by a net gain of 10 per cent. This is a huge increase nationally, but locally for a club of 20 that’s only two more members.

Secondly we would like to encourage an increase in project partnership, especially at the local services level.

Finally, we would like to improve our public relations skills. All voluntary organisations have a set life cycle of 100 years or so, because people and organisation inevitably get stereotyped in what they are trying to achieve. And we at Rotary are not currently taking advantage of all the modern technology and tools available to us to avoid this fate. We have to learn to get the best out of our public relations, to get into a position were we are trusted, and can make the most of our opportunities.

As such we are trying to educate our clubs, to ensure that they have good websites and have good PR people who understand how to get an article in to a newspaper for example. Once we sort this out, I know we will get more Rotarians.

In terms of our charity, The Rotary Foundation of Rotary International, we have several educational and humanitarian objectives there too. One of which is the eradication of polio. There is only one other major disease which has ever been eradicated and that was smallpox, and was the dream of the world health organization.

In 1986 the world was spending .5bn a year treating polio victims. That same year, Rotarians launched a pilot scheme in the Philippines to vaccinate every child under five for 10 years. The success of that scheme was such that the World Health Organisation, Unicef and the American Centre for Disease Control entered into a partnership with us to immunise every child in the world. This became the international polio immunisation campaign, with Rotary at its very heart, thanks to our presence in local communities across the world, which meant we were able to deliver the necessary services at the local level.

In 1986, when we started our campaign there were some 350,000 new cases of polio every year. Today in 2007 this is down to 2000 outbreaks a year. There are now only four countries in the entire world which are polio endemic. And we have just celebrated the 10th anniversary of the eradication of polio in Europe.

To date we have immunised over two billion children. As such immunisation is no longer our main priority we are now focusing on eradication. We are now at a stage focusing on those wild outbreaks of the disease; to discover why they are occurring and to develop vaccines to tackle them. Our objective is now one of surveillance. This is the next step in the eradication of polio and a step closer to Rotary possibly being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize  which I believe it deserves for its efforts.

When we first started we tried to grab as many children as possible and vaccinate them, but through experience and working with other organisation such as Unicef, we were able to develop our methods and learn how to campaign and hold clinics within communities, leading to the creation of our National Immunisation Days (NIDs) which have proved to be a huge success. In India for example 250,000 Rotarians and volunteers after months of planning and advertising were able to immunise over 132 million children in just one day. We are very proud of this.

Coupled to that, another programme which I think will be just as beneficial to the world is one of our charities education programmes; the Rotary World Peace Centres. There are six of these centres attached to six different universities across the world including the University of Bradford where we are holding a major peace seminar in November. Through this we fund 60 students a year, to study at these centres.

Graduates from this scheme are now having a significant impact on encouraging peace and ending conflict. One graduate now works under Kofi Annan and was influential in organising the elections in Afghanistan a few years ago. We really are ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

Daily Rotarians doing extraordinary work; up the Amazon on child welfare, in Nepal there are Rotarians helping to deliver and build local hospitals; at home in Britain & Ireland we have Rotary Ptogrammes where young people help other young people; young people getting up at 7 o'clock in the morning to earn money so that they can provide breakfast for their impoverished classmates. These are the types of things Rotary is involved in.

Question:  That is notable, given that young people are so often viewed as anti-social.

Allan O. Jagger: Well last year we started a competition Rotary Young Citizens Award to recognise outstanding young people in Great Britain and Ireland, the five winners of which were profiled in April on a BBC News 24 programme.

We also have our Youth Speak Competitions, where young people stand up and debate issues that they wish to profile, and they do it as well as any politician. There is also the Rotary Young Chef programme, sponsored this year by a well know olive oil producer Filippo Berio, which is run both regionally and nationally.

These programmes produce imagination that is beyond comprehension.

Question: You still seem very optimistic about the role of Rotary and the world in general, despite the numerous problems that you as a Rotarian obviously see?

Allan O. Jagger: Well 99.9 per cent of people in this world are kind people. How many truly evil people have you ever met? The small minority of evil people in the world should not influence how the rest of us wish to live.

Most of the worlds problems, in my opinion are down to preconceived ideas and misconceptions. When I was a young boy, as a Protestant, I was not allowed to play with Catholics, but I was never told why. I have hosted students from America who have never met a Muslim, how can they hope to understand Islam if they have never met a Muslim. Rotary helps to create international understanding through our way of life and our work.

I’m very optimistic about the future of Rotary and the world, because we are a responsible and recognised organisation that delivers what we say we will, and that gives me faith.

Question: I understand Birmingham will be central to your plans this year?

Allan O. Jagger: Yes, Birmingham is to host the 2009 Rotary International Conference. The event will be the largest ever conference in the UK with over 25,000 people expected to attend, and is set to bring in over £20m for the local Birmingham economy, along with a string of tremendous PR opportunities. A real coup for Birmingham, Britain and Ireland and its many Rotarians.

Question: Do you have any specific messages about Rotary that you would like to convey within the political context?

Allan O. Jagger: Yes, volunteerism and the amount of effort put in by Joe Blogs, giving his/her time for free, to make life better for people in their communities that they know and on a broader scale people they will never meet. It’s the commitment to that, the government should look at, to see its potential and develop it.

Local Rotary Clubs are now involved in things we would never have thought we would be involved in, because politically, how this country has developed, we are not doing the things for society that we used to.

One thing that I have always been involved in is work based learning for school leavers. As part of the Learning Skills Council we now have to employ tutors to teach key skills to kids that have just left school, it’s ridiculous. How can we have a system like that, that’s essentially failed? How can we have a system which forces kids to form gangs for their own safety, and become threatening to others?

I think the government needs to understand what volunteers are trying to do, and how we are trying to create a better society. Yet they don’t always listen to organisations on the ground. They are too caught up in their own political agendas, to listen to the people who are dealing with those problems, and suffering from these problems. When you live on a council estate, and I was brought up on a council estate, politicians don’t understand what its like to live there.  If they would listen to locals and involve voluntary organisations and share resources we could deliver the need required.

Question: So you’re not asking for funding, but rather just for the government to listen to you and tap into your expertise?

Allan O. Jagger: Exactly, just listen and to tap into our expertise. Volunteers are willing to do the work, and they demonstrate this day in day out, but they don’t get any recognition for it. Volunteers could help local and national government if only they would listen.

Question: Are there any other Rotary programmes you would like to discuss?

Allan O. Jagger: Well the educational programmes offered by the Rotary Foundation are vast; one programme I would like to highlight is the Ambassadorial Scholars programme.

In 1947 our founder Paul Harris died. To recognise his work local Rotarians in Chicago set up an endowment plan. They each invested ,000 to set up a scheme to send scholars to live and study abroad. They is called this programme Ambassadorial Scholars.

Since then the programme has mushroomed, today we have sent worldwide some 38,000 of these scholars. There are people in government who are former Ambassadorial Scholars. It is a huge educational programme.

The UK has traditionally benefited well from this programme, on average we receive around 1,200 scholars every year. If you compare this to the Rhodes scholarship which only sends 90 a year, ours is a huge programme.

The real beauty of the scheme is that scholars are given a host Rotary family to look after them while they are at university, adding the ambassadorial cultural exchange aspect to the programme.

The UK receives roughly around 25 per cent of all Ambassadorial Scholar students, which equates to m a year coming into our economy. The goodwill the programme has created is fantastic and the UK has benefited greatly from it. It’s a network that should not be undervalued.

Coupled to that, we have the group study exchange programme where two Rotary Districts in two different countries exchange groups of young business and professional  people with vocational experience, allowing participants to learn new skills, while fostering huge amounts of international understanding.

Yes these programmes are hugely expensive, but they are ones which reap tangible benefits year upon year.

Questions: So what programmes are Rotary running in the UK?

Allan O. Jagger: One scheme we run is the Rotary Youth Leadership Awards.

As part of the Rotary Youth Leadership Awards. Funded by local Rotarians this programme pinpoints potential young leaders in the local community, between the ages of 13 and 16 and enrolling them on a course for four days. The course run by professionals give each participant the opportunity to develop good leadership and citizenship skills. The scheme has had some fantastic success stories and it is amazing to see the transformation courses like RYLA can have on the lives of young people.

We look for those from underprivileged backgrounds, and those that we can really help as well as the bright leaders of the future.